Credit to The Athletic for crafting the most haunting lede of 2026. Monday's article about the Eagles head coach begins with a single, chilling sentence: "Nick Sirianni discovered ChatGPT this offseason."
The mind reels. More and more of what sucks about modern life is the result of a certain kind of person becoming overly enamored with the capabilities of chatbots. You hear that someone recently "discovered ChatGPT," and you reflexively begin preparing for a near future in which that person will soon be excitedly detailing hours-long conversations they had with their computer.
So how far gone is Sirianni?
It’s his sixth season as the Philadelphia Eagles’ head coach, now longer than any stop in his NFL coaching career, and the stories are beginning to repeat themselves. How many times can he preach his “tough, detailed, together” mantra before it feels like a rock star playing the greatest hits on tour?
That’s why Sirianni logged into the artificial intelligence chatbot on a Monday in June — a program he knew so little about that he couldn’t get the name right — and began his research with a prompt: “Give me a great relentless effort true sports story.”
This rabbit hole is how Sirianni learned about Anthony Robles, an Arizona State wrestler born with one leg who won a national championship in 2011. Sirianni planned to incorporate the anecdote into a speech to the team, a way to tell an old message in a new way.
Not too bad. A chatbot's least harmful function is acting as a glorified search engine, but even here we are starting see signs of degradation. "Give me a great relentless effort true sports story" is the sort of barely coherent string of words that a person starts typing into a computer when they start getting more comfortable with the idea of an LLM doing all of their thinking for them.
Eagles fans may be tempted to write this off as no big deal. Yeah yeah, the coach used ChatGPT to find some inspirational sports stories. No big deal. But consider this: Sirianni, who doesn't call plays on either side of the ball, is already known as a "CEO coach," and he is entering his sixth season on the job. There are few things in America more dangerous than a bored CEO using ChatGPT, and the consequences for the Eagles could be tremendous.
Just you wait. Don't be surprised if by Week 7 Sirianni is suggesting that the Eagles' offense might actually be more efficient if the offensive line was downsized to just three players, setting a weekly token quota for the quarterbacks room, and asking his passing game coordinator how many agents he has running at any given time.
